This is a good FAQ, I'm not going to dispute that. My beef with him is on another thing entirely. If you look, he constantly says "I hate the English names," and "The Japanese names are soooooo much cooler." He does this even for names that are EXACTLY THE SAME. Oh shit, Fia has an extra 'a' sound at the end in the Japanese version! SUPERIOR! Oh fuck, Hekutaa just SOUNDS cooler than Hector! YEAH!!!

What the fuck is with this Japanophile bullshit? Hekutaa does not sound any better than Hector, and your shitty faggot romaji skills don't help much either. Fucking Japanese elitist bullshit. I'm betting you he doesn't even know Japanese, he probably just goes "OMG JAPANESE SO SUPERIOR" because he's one of those Wappanese purist assholes.

I dunno, this is just one of my pet peeves, people who just indiscriminately go "Japanese is just SO much better, it R0x0rZ my B0X0rZ lol" while eating Pocky and drinking "KORAA" because people who say "Coke" are stupid gaijin bitches. I mean, I've learned a fair bit of Japanese myself, and I like the language, people like this just annoy me to no end.

That's one of my big pet peeves too. But I think I hate what's on the IMDB more, even though it's essentially the same as your complaint; take a look at this and this. The name is right there on the fucking packaging, don't make this bullshit wannabe Japanese crap when the fucking CASE reads differently. Damn, why the fuck are they getting away with this shit anyway?

God. I bet Tedius is at fault for the IMDB. :P

Edit: Taking another look at that... To be fair, it seemed like he started progress before the game came out in the US. So it's not like he got the game, played through it, then decided to be an ass and use only the japanese names.

Yes, Ash, I feel the same. In the link for that Disgaea anime that Dosh posted on the old boards, the guy in the blog was calling Mid-Boss Chu-Boss. ...Cause you know, the joke carries over in translation like that so well.

It's just the OMFG otakus, a term which is trendy in itself, being trendy fucks. I hope that soon this fascination with anime and video games and manga and omfg Japan ends, because these flippant fanboys and fangirls are really starting to grate on my nerves with their uninformed rampant trendy ideals.

Thing is, in the US college anime clubs wear and toss the "otaku" label as something of a badge of honor or something whereas in Japan "otaku" is an insult and not a flattering thing to be known as. University anime clubs frighten me; the people are creepy, man. I love quality animation as much as the next person 'round these parts, but god damn. That has got to be a near universal truth that ANY university anime club has creepy people. It doesn't matter whether it's at NYU, Rutgers, SUNY Albany, Harvard, wherever. The Ivy League anime clubbers are probably the worst of them all.

Funny thing Ash, is that I used to be one of those idiots a decade or so ago who was all like "Japanese stuff is superior to American stuff" and secretly wanted to be Japanese, but I quickly realized I was being an idiot and grew up. I feel extremely slimy, dirty, filthy, and my skin crawls something awful when I recall those days of my narrow-minded idiocy.

One of my friends is a TA for a Japanese Culture class and hoo boy he gets all the doozies. You know, the folks who are all disillisioned that the class is NOT all about anime and video games. The "I have a Japanese girlfriend and therefore I know more than you" crowd. The classic self-hating Americans who are all like "Japanese way is the best way, I wanna be Japanese, I am ashamed to be a white cracker gaijin."

Haha, that is EXACTLY what turned me away from the anime club around here. I thought maybe I'll meet someone worth hanging with and get to watch some free anime. They are all pasty white, japanese wannabes and god I wanted to smack the shit out of all of them.

This happens when people reduce Japan to anime and games. As Neal mentioned, being called an "otaku" in Japan is not exactly a compliment, since it basically implies that you have nothing better to do than sit around in your room and play games or watch anime.I don't like when people act as if they are fluent in Japanese, because they might be able to write kana and know a few dozen kanji, but the hardcore "otaku" faction is at least as annoying. If people would take the time and walk the few minutes from Akihabara towards Ueno and look at the homeless people camping in certain areas of the park or God forbid take a tour of the National Museum, it remind them that Japan is more than "Game Heaven".

As for the topic at hand, one very notable case of this is with Miyazaki movies. Most anime movies people are willing to use their English titles but if you ever take a peak at the animeondvd forums or other popular anime hangouts, Miyazaki movies are ALWAYS written using the Japanese titles.

I guess we have to face it... the good majority of anime/video game fans here in the states think Japan is pretty much that, a world of anime.

I too get annoyed at the language used from the fans here. I use to run an anime club at my old high school. People there just used words like "Kawaii" and "Nani" like they actually knew what they were talking about. They also made it evident that every word they said had to end in 'a'. *sigh*

About the whole Otaku thing...well, I have not lived in Japan, so I do not know the culture too well, but I can assume its like being called an obsessive fanatic.

I will always look at Japan as the video game Mecca. As a pretty avarage human being with a basic set of common sense, I know better than to reduce the country and its people as just some isalnd that makes cartoons that had women with huge boobs and eyes and video games where I can walk into people's houses and loot it with out them saying a word, or possibly direct me to my next dungeon.

My brother has actually had the luck to tour in Japan two times, and has so many pictures and such from each trip that really blows my mind. He even has a video of when he was messing with his camera one moring and he hears some drumming and chanting outside. He looks out the window and sees about 15 monks (neither of us were really sure what religion they were, to be honest) chanting and walking towards this small shrine that was a few houses down. He filmed it for about 3 mins and then took a whole bunch of pictures of the temple as well. When she showed them to me when he got back, he told me that it blew his mind.

I guess there is a lot to be said about those attitudes and maturity.There was a point in highschool when I was every bit the trendy anime nerd. For some reason it seems I just grew out of it. I realized that I have to have my own identity and that I actually could find things of interest and beauty in my own culture, not just the pop culture from an island three thousand miles away. I still find Japan interesting, just not superior. I would still like to study the language, but just to enrich myself. That and playing imports would be fun ;)

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I can't say I've been completely innocent, as I was guilty of some of that 'japan > everything' crap late in Middle School/early in High School, but I was at least never dumb enough to take blatantly non-Japanese words and try to pronounce/spell them like they were japanese.

Nevertheless, pending a really stupid name change, I tend to be apathetic for which name is better; I'm talking about stuff like Rolf and Eusis (both I think are good), and not stuff like Fia and Fiaa. And there are times when I prefer to refer to a game by it's japanese name than it's american name, namely Tales of Eternia.

This is a good FAQ, I'm not going to dispute that. My beef with him is on another thing entirely. If you look, he constantly says "I hate the English names," and "The Japanese names are soooooo much cooler."

Discuss.

haha I don't want to deceive you but I'm one of those guys but with the English/French languages :P

"I hate French names... The English names are soooooo much cooler :D" lol

But in this case, that's true. I've seen many french translation from english books/games and the names are really sounding gay heh